Lives of the Saints

The religious right’s leading ghostwriter.

For Lynn Vincent, faith offered a reprieve after a scattered, permissive upbringing.Credit Illustration by Jorge Arévalo

On Labor Day weekend, the writer Lynn Vincent was shopping at a used bookstore in San Diego, in a neighborhood called Normal Heights. The selection was eclectic: on the front rack, a copy of “Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology” was displayed next to “More Guns, Less Crime.” Vincent stopped to page through “Interview with the Vampire,” which, to her delight, had been signed by Anne Rice. “I interviewed her once, when she rediscovered her Catholic roots,” Vincent said. At the time, she was writing for the Christian magazine World, where she worked for eleven years before she found success as a ghostwriter. “I like this book because he’s a morally complex vampire. He really struggles with evil.”

The books Vincent writes—which have sold more than ten million copies—are often stories of redemption after just such a struggle. “The Prodigal Comes Home,” a memoir she wrote for the gospel star Michael English, traces his descent into addiction and adultery and his triumphant return to religion. “Same Kind of Different as Me” is about a homeless, illiterate African-American man named Denver Moore who did time for armed robbery before he found Jesus and became best friends with a wealthy white Christian art dealer and his wife. The book has sold more than a million copies.

The core of Vincent’s readership is in the Christian market, and requires “some content filters,” according to Bryan Norman, an associate publisher at Thomas Nelson, which has released five of Vincent’s books. Such readers want material that is “copacetic for my world view, my faith view,” he added. “What sets apart the Christian market is an inspirational, uplifting message”—and the assurance that “I’m not going to open this book and find a string of curse words.” Vincent’s two biggest hits have been about what she calls “ordinary people living extraordinary lives.” “Heaven Is for Real,” which has sold more than seven million copies, tells the tale of a three-year-old, the son of a pastor, who visits the Promised Land while he’s sedated during an emergency appendectomy, and returns to tell his parents what he saw: “ ‘Do you know that Jesus sits right next to God?’ Colton went on excitedly. ‘Jesus’ chair is right next to his Dad’s!’ ”

Vincent, who was about to turn fifty, said she did not view the imagery in that book as metaphorical. “There are a lot of people who would consider themselves, um, on the left side of the political spectrum who have no problem with the mystical things that happen in Eastern religions, but when it comes to the Western Judeo-Christian tradition they scoff. Well, there’s either a natural and a supernatural, or it’s a completely material world. I don’t believe that the world is only material.” She did hesitate over one detail of Colton’s experience, though: “That was when Colton said that in Heaven people have wings—because the Scripture makes no reference to that. If I put that people in Heaven have wings, orthodox Christians are going to think that the book is a hoax.” Vincent brought her concerns to her editor. “She said, ‘You know what? Either it’s God’s story, and Colton really did get a glimpse of Heaven, and we faithfully tell it, or we don’t do this book.’ ” The wings stayed in, and the book has remained on the Times best-seller list for ninety-seven weeks.

Vincent’s highest-profile book, “Going Rogue,” is the similarly unlikely story of an everyday girl from Wasilla, Alaska, who was thrust into an exalted realm. According to the book, before Sarah Palin became the queen of the hockey moms, she was just “a young mother-to-be with a blue-collar husband” who knew that someday she’d “work for the ordinary, hardworking people—like everyone who was a part of my ordinary, hardworking world.” Vincent told me, “I think in some ways even Sarah Palin comes from ordinariness.” Vincent, a small woman with sea-green eyes and short, layered hair, furrowed her brow. “Though you wouldn’t say being a governor of a state is ordinary.”

Palin and Vincent have much in common ideologically, and they share a gift for recasting murky, complex issues as satisfyingly simple parables. This folksy clarity helps make Vincent’s books—like Palin’s self-presentation—appealing to millions of people who share her views, and also infuriating to many liberals, who experience it as insidious manipulation. In a review of “Going Rogue” for The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban wrote that the book’s underlying argument “hinges on the not-so-tacit assumption that the average, hardworking churchgoer . . . is in a better position to judge, on ‘principle,’ the merits of an economic policy or the deployment of American troops abroad than the ‘experts.’ ” The book, he concluded, was “a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance.”

“Going Rogue” is the only one of Vincent’s collaborations that does not have her name on the cover, but it is the one that brought her the most attention. As the publicity effort for the book began, liberal bloggers and pundits sifted her articles at World and accused her of gay-bashing, race-baiting, and conservative agitprop. “Oh, my gosh!” Vincent said, sitting on a tiny chair in the children’s section of the bookstore. “Then I was the right-wing neo-Nazi homophobic racist. And I was like, That’s not me!”

As a conservative Christian writer in Southern California, far from the predominantly liberal New York literary establishment, Vincent has felt misunderstood and stereotyped. Her heroes are writers like Sebastian Junger, Laura Hillenbrand, and Jon Krakauer. “My go-to getaway genre is suspense; when I grow up I want to be a suspense novelist,” Vincent, who was wearing jeans, a green American Eagle shirt, and a heart-shaped pendant, said. Despite an emphasis on everyday authenticity, her books are written with thriller-like pacing, and with the moral certitude of fables. “When I was in college and we were supposed to be reading ‘Beowulf,’ I was reading Stephen King,” she said. “I would really dig the more modern writers like Twain, but I feel like an intellectual failure because I could not appreciate these things like ‘Beowulf.’ I don’t feel like I can wear the tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches and smoke a pipe.”

A few days later, two dozen members of the San Diego Christian Writers Guild assembled for a workshop at Vincent’s new house, a single-story hacienda high up in the hills. She and her husband, Danny, an air-traffic controller, had recently moved in, after spending months in an R.V. while the place was renovated, and they hadn’t had time to bring in furniture. But Vincent had set up a table with snacks: California rolls, devilled eggs, and grapes drizzled with white and dark chocolate. The writers sat in a circle under a trellis twined with pink bougainvillea. It was a hot day, and the air smelled of eucalyptus and rosemary.

The students were mostly women, but there were a few men, including one who worked at the Rock, a fifteen-thousand-member megachurch where Vincent is a parishioner. Gail, a butter-blond woman wearing a turquoise T-shirt and a peasant skirt, said that she was collaborating on a book with a professor from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Beth said that she used to write dinner theatre and was now working on a memoir. Francine, a big woman with shoulder-length brown hair, said that she was writing “the story of God making my husband and me surrender everything: my husband’s health, his job, his life, our home, everything.” There were murmurs of appreciation. “And we have seven kids.”

When it was Vincent’s turn, she said that at first she had wanted to be a political writer, “but it turned out not to be my calling.” She had come to understand that what readers want most is a “powerful emotional experience—which has the unfortunate acronym PEE!” She grinned and asked the students, “What was a book that made us PEE?” Vincent mentioned John le Carré, and someone else said Alex Haley’s “Roots.” Gail said, “Honestly, what comes to mind is ‘Same Kind of Different as Me.’ ”

Vincent had titled the day’s workshop “The Sacred ICPID,” an acronym for “I couldn’t put it down”—the quality that she most values in a book, whether it’s “Common Sense” (“a serious page-turner: no wonder the colonies revolted!”) or “The Shining.” “When I achieve that,” Vincent said, “even if I made somebody mad at least I got through.” She was sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a sleeveless flowered sundress. “It’s only part art—that’s the gift part, that’s the God part.” Given a small spark of inspiration, everyone could achieve ICPID, just by applying a few techniques. From James Patterson, Vincent had learned to make every scene its own chapter, and she likes to end every chapter on a “cliffhanger or danger alert,” to draw the reader on to the next. When she finishes a draft, she goes back to “fine-tune the chapter endings if they’re not sufficiently ICPID-y.” To illustrate, she turned to a scene in “Same Kind of Different as Me,” in one of the sections narrated by Denver Moore, a sharecropper’s son who spent his childhood picking cotton in Louisiana. “I’m going to do a Southern-black-man voice,” Vincent said. “I’m not real good at it.” Sounding very much like Uncle Remus, she read the last lines of the chapter: “On Tuesdays, I started waitin till there wadn’t no line so I could get through real fast without talking to that couple at all. But that didn’t mean I wadn’t watchin em.” Not every chapter could offer a hook that good, she conceded. But, even when she couldn’t end on a cliffhanger, she said, “I try to do what I call sticking the landing.” She explained, “In gymnastics, when you watch someone on a balance beam, they can do the whole thing perfect, but if they land on their butt?”

Vincent picked up a copy of “Gone with the Wind.” “I found a chapter in here I thought we could improve on,” she said, with a giggle. “I’ll read it aloud, and you tell me where she could have ended it sooner to stick the landing.” She read a passage from Chapter 8, in which Scarlett travels to Atlanta, where she nurses Confederate soldiers and pines for Ashley. When Vincent was finished reading, the students said that it should end with “how unfair that everyone should think her heart was in the grave when it wasn’t at all.” Vincent nodded and told them, “After that, it trails off.”

Short chapters were crucial for momentum; she also advocated one-sentence paragraphs, even though “in school you’re not allowed to do that.” Things like “talking heads, statistics, and certain kinds of history” are to be meted out sparingly, as they slow down the page-turning. “The first time I read ‘Gone with the Wind,’ I remember thinking, Do we have to read another description of the rolling red hills of Georgia?” she said. “Sometimes with antiquated texts there are just great big blocks of static description and it’s like, All right, already!”

After the workshop, Vincent sat and drank iced tea with her friend Don Hollins, her son’s former high-school math teacher, who had joined in to get ideas for a memoir he’s writing. A tall, hazel-eyed man, Hollins had a tattoo of a flame leaping up his forearm, and was wearing a belt with a skull on the buckle. Hollins, who is gay, told me that Vincent’s son had suggested he talk to her about his book; he was nervous when he learned that she’d collaborated with Palin, but he’d sought her out, anyway. “For the next year, she met with me twice a month,” he said.

Vincent taught him to write a minimum number of words each day. “I came up with this years ago,” she said. “(B+C-I-P)n—it means butt, plus chair, minus Internet and phone, times the number of words you can write without breaking a sweat.” Vincent’s number is three hundred and fifty: “If I do that twice a day, it’s seven hundred words,” she said, which, by the end of a work week, adds up to “two chapters or two feature articles.” It’s crucial to set a goal that doesn’t intimidate you, “because as writers we’ll do anything—organize the closet, clean the garage—to avoid writing.”

Both Vincent and Hollins served in the military and said that it had vastly improved their discipline. Vincent joined the Navy when she was twenty-one and stayed on active duty until she was thirty. “For the first year, I was really kind of laissez-faire,” she said. “A senior chief—a lesbian, actually—she really inspired me: I began to straighten out my uniform, my punctuality. She had short, silvery hair—prematurely silver.”

“Anderson Cooper?” Hollins asked.

Vincent nodded, and said that she admired the officer’s professionalism—“Sharp, pulled together. When I met Palin for the first time, she was like that. A knockout. She was even more beautiful in person.”

In the Navy, Vincent trained to be an air-traffic controller, and she loved the job; she left only because she started having migraine headaches. For a while, she ran a business helping former members of the military repackage themselves for civilian careers. But she had always wanted to be a writer, and so she began pitching stories, first to local free weeklies and eventually to national magazines. “The first time I heard ‘Hi, Lynn, this is World magazine,’ on my answering machine, I literally injured myself on the way to the phone,” she said. It was 1998, at the beginning of the Y2K scare, and she did a story about Christians who were stockpiling food for the millennial meltdown. Vincent was hired as a staff writer the following year.

At World, whose mission is to report the news “from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God,” Vincent’s beat was “action adventure—the shootings at the school in Colorado, a shooting at the church in Fort Worth,” the editor-in-chief, Marvin Olasky, said. “Even in the evangelical world, there are nasty things that go on: renegade pastors, sexual stuff. There are some people who think, We’re Christian conservatives, we’re supposed to be doing public relations for God.” Vincent, however, was unafraid to point out “unpleasant things about our own side, not just the enemy.”

After more than a decade as a reporter, Vincent began to write books. “God sort of brought me along in terms of this craft of collaborating,” she explained. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.” Lee Hough, an agent at Alive Communications, in Colorado Springs, showed her a manuscript by Ron Hall, one of the narrators of what became “Same Kind of Different as Me.” Hough had been trying to sell the book for two years. “Lee had gone to every publisher: he was in prayer over this book, to the point of tears,” Vincent said. “When I heard what it was about, I said, I have to write this book.” She conducted extensive interviews with the principals and reshaped the manuscript with Hall; “seventy per cent is me interviewing them and thirty per cent is stuff that came from Ron’s writing, paragraphs from here and there, shuffled together,” she said. The book came out in 2006, and languished for more than a year, until Sky, the Delta in-flight magazine, ran an excerpt. “People would get off the plane and go to the airport bookstore and they’d be sold out,” Vincent said. In October of 2008, the book became a Times best-seller. “I was ecstatic! I thought, I don’t care if I’m only there five minutes—they can’t take that away.”

Her next hit, “Heaven Is for Real,” came to her via two channels, Pastor Todd Burpo, the father of the visionary boy, explained to me: “One, just prayer—God asked me to ask my agent to give her a call. And then, two, my agent and her agent work for the same company.” The book was entirely true to his son’s experience, Burpo said, but he was impressed by the artful way that Vincent told the story. “Her chapter breaks and starts were just amazing,” he said. “Most people start reading it and they think, Well, I can read one more chapter—and then I can read one more. All the time, people come up to us and say, ‘I shouldn’t have started this in the evening, because I was up all night.’ The other big one we hear from ladies is ‘My husband never read a book before.’ ”

For all the up-all-night seductiveness of Vincent’s books, they are at heart lessons in old-fashioned rectitude and gumption. If one of her characters is complaining, it is a sure sign that a rebuke from God is just around the corner. “ ‘This isn’t fair,’ I grumbled aloud, as I struggled up the stairs, one crutch at a time,” Todd Burpo moans in “Heaven Is for Real,” after he breaks his leg and ankle, suffers from kidney stones, and has a lumpectomy on a hyperplasia under his left nipple. “Feeling pretty smug in my martyrdom, I had just reached the top landing when a still, small voice arose in my heart: And what did my Son do for you?” Burpo quickly realized the error of his ways and “swung forward with renewed strength, as if my crutches were eagles’ wings.”

Vincent scrutinizes Christians as well as nonbelievers for lapses in their faith. In “Same Kind of Different,” Ron Hall, a successful, driven art dealer and a practicing evangelical, finds himself at a business lunch with “the kind of woman who seems to grow indigenously in California, right alongside the palm trees.” They drink too much white wine, and inevitably there comes “a meaningful pause . . . in the eyes, the sparkle of invitation.” He succumbs to lust, just as he succumbed to greed, placing his career before his faith and his family.

But there is always hope for sinners in Vincent’s narratives, whether they are Christians who strayed or bona-fide villains like Kamal Saleem, the protagonist of “The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist’s Memoir of Death and Redemption.” And when the righteous are stricken by suffering—Todd Burpo with his son on the operating table; Denver Moore, homeless and ostracized by people who “think that kind of troubled life gon’ rub off on em”—they are assured that, if only they believe, in the end they will be blessed. Whether you have done wrong or had it done to you, Vincent’s books offer the alluring promise that no one is too wretched to be saved.

When Vincent was born, her parents were unwed. They lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, where her father worked as a computer programmer. Her mother, Jan, “would leave me alone when I was less than three and go out and drink with the local sailors” at a bar called the Missile Lounge, she said. A cocktail waitress there would sometimes call her father at work: “She’d say, ‘Jan’s down here again,’ so he would have to come home and get me.” Her parents split up when Vincent was three, and she didn’t see her father again until a few years ago. “He gave me the most chilling detail recently,” she said. One day, he came home and found her locked in the closet, with a chair wedged underneath the doorknob. “When he opened the door, I was just playing. I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t freaking out, which kind of leads me to believe I had been there before.”

Vincent’s mother married another man, and when Vincent was five they had a daughter. Her stepfather, whom Vincent described as “a screaming liberal,” was drafted into the Army, and the family moved to Germany, and then to Hawaii. The marriage didn’t last. “I think my stepfather had acted as a stabilizing force,” she said, “something that was keeping my mother from doing what she really wanted to do.” After the breakup, her mother worked as a lab technologist, and they lived with their dog, Pakalolo (the Hawaiian word for marijuana), in a house in Kailua with a constant flow of visitors. “The living room would be full of guys—bikers, drug dealers,” Vincent said. “You know those old square Pan Am flight bags? I remember a guy bringing one entirely full of Thai stick.” The adults who came and went had little sense of responsibility. “I remember eating a lot of Chunky Sirloin Burger soup and Minute rice,” she said. “I’d fix that for my sister and me, because there was no cooking going on, no domesticity.” For Vincent, the experience of a permissive, hedonistic life was hellish. When she was thirteen and her sister was eight, “in that house, she was molested and I was molested in full hearing of my mother: three incidents within six months.” They were evicted after her mother lost her job, and so they squatted in an abandoned house, a “place where anyone could stay—the price of admission was, just, you had to have some weed or some hash.” But the police kicked them out. “We ended up on the beach, in a tent. I don’t have anything from my childhood.”

Soon after they started living on the beach, Vincent saw a Samoan man her mother was dating whisper something in her ear. “I still don’t know what he said to her, but she came tearing after me in the sand, screaming. She knocked me down and put her hands around my throat and started choking me.” Vincent broke away and ran, until she saw a bus and got on it, wearing just a sundress and a bikini. “I saw this sign on the bus that said ‘Hale Kipa,’ which means House of Welcome. When we got there, it was dark, and I was barefoot. I walked to the house and it was this fairy-tale blue Victorian and I could hear laughter inside, but I was afraid to go in. So I sat on the steps, and pretty soon this lady with long red hair came out.” Vincent moved in, and after a few weeks the red-haired woman started asking her what she believed in. “It was the first time anybody had talked to me about God.”

In 1977, she went to live with her maternal grandmother, in Alabama. “I took off over seas and beaches and palm trees, and when I got to Alabama we descended over muddy rivers and clumps of I don’t know what,” she said. She had come from a place with no rules, and now she was “plunked down in the middle of the Bible Belt, and they were going to church on Sundays and diagramming sentences in English class.” It was a difficult adjustment. “The sexual mores were very different. I had grown up in a house where if it feels good do it. Now I was in a place where good girls don’t.”

Vincent marks this as the start of her time as a “champion sinner.” She experimented with sex, did drugs, and went to rock concerts: “Boston, Rush, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvin Bishop, AC/DC before Bon Scott died—we drove down to Birmingham in a van, loaded.” She felt lonely and lost. “I remember when I was a junior the teacher gave an assignment: write down your three most closely held values. The other kids wrote down things like God, family, and America, you know? I think I just made something up.”

Vincent went to Jacksonville State University, where she majored in English and physical education, and worked at the school paper. (Her classmate Robert Stacy McCain remembers meeting her “when she was the news editor at the paper—looking mighty good in jeans, I might add—with a spiky Pat Benatar haircut.”) But she dropped out just a few credits short of graduation to join the Navy. “I had a problem with finishing things,” she said.

When she was twenty-five, she started dating Danny Vincent, a twenty-one-year-old trainee at her base; they were married a year later. “I knew that his mom was something called a Christian,” Vincent recalled. But she was introduced to the Bible by an elderly Jehovah’s Witness named Leona, who kept coming to the door; Vincent let her in, and they began to study. “One day, I’m standing in front of the stove, and what the Old Testament calls ‘a still, small voice’ said to my heart—not audibly—‘Go to church,’ ” she said. When she went, “I knew I was hearing the truth. But the thing that I wish more people understood is that the experience of conversion came from outside in: God gets ahold of me and changes me. It’s not an intellectual ascent to a doctrinal system.”

This distinction is important to Vincent. “I didn’t get, like, a G.O.P. transplant,” she told me. (The same construction appears in “Going Rogue”: “I was amazed at how many liberal pundits seemed floored by a pregnant teenager, as if overnight they’d all snuck out and had traditional-values transplants.”) She imagines that the secular left sees practicing Christians as credulous zealots. “There’s this whole notion of abortion extremism,” she said. “People look at someone like me and they think that I have bought into the Judeo-Christian G.O.P. position, that I haven’t thought it through, that I don’t have personal experience with it. But, in my case, that just isn’t true.” Vincent had an abortion when she was sixteen. “I didn’t regret it until I had my own children”—Jacob, eighteen, and Christian, twenty-one—“and when I looked at them and saw what I had done . . .” She trailed off, and started to cry.

“If I hadn’t done that, there would be a human being. It could have been . . . who knows? Someone who changed the world.” The good thing about having sinned, she said, is that it gives her the ability to empathize with her subjects, even about their most painful secrets. “There’s no one, I don’t think, including people who have killed somebody, who can say to me, ‘I’ve done worse things than you.’ ”

Vincent’s humility is useful in a profession that is defined by putting someone else first. Even when a ghostwriter sells millions of books, she gets little glory, and comparatively little money. “I always worry that people will think, Oh, she’s sold ten million books, so she’s a ten-millionaire,” Vincent said. “But that’s not the way the formula works out, especially as a collaborator, when you may just work for hire, so how it sells doesn’t affect your paycheck.” A collaborator is also denied one of a writer’s principal satisfactions: creative control. Nathan Whitaker, who collaborated on memoirs with the Christian football figures Tim Tebow and Tony Dungy, told me, “Some of my best parts hit the cutting-room floor. And some of the parts where people say, ‘That’s a little pedestrian,’ it’s like, well, I didn’t write that part.”

During the workshop, a student had asked about the various kinds of credit an author can receive. “There’s ‘by,’ there’s ‘with,’ ” Vincent explained, smirking. “Or, with Sarah Palin, it was, like, ‘Thanks, Lynn Vincent, for taking out the trash.’ ” Vincent’s name appears only once in “Going Rogue,” on the second page of the acknowledgments, where Palin thanks her for “her indispensable help in getting words on paper.” Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of Harper, which put out the book, told me, “It’s always really tricky between the subject and the ghostwriter. Sometimes there’s a massive falling out—in forty per cent of the cases—and we have to hire a new writer, usually because the subject doesn’t like what he sees reflected in the mirror and he blames the writer, not himself.” Vincent was the only collaborator on “Going Rogue,” but a person involved with the book’s publication said that Palin and her staff reworked what Vincent had written because Palin felt that it had made her voice “too down-homey.”

Vincent is bound by a nondisclosure agreement, and will say little about working with Palin, but she told me that she questioned the way McCain had chosen his running mate: “Whatever anyone’s opinion of her faults and failings, to tap someone to be a Veep candidate a few days before the Convention was really not the best plan.” When “Going Rogue” came out, Vincent felt similarly unprepared for the public response. In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan called her a “fanatical homophobe,” pointing to her work at World, where she once wrote, “The gay quest for ‘civil rights’ bears little resemblance to the struggles of blacks and suffragists, whose eventual liberation benefited society at large. Instead, it calls up the American communists of the ’50s and ’60s who, in order to advance the radical interests of a narrow group, created a spurious ‘victim class.’ ” A blogger at the Daily Beast castigated her for referring to abortion among African-Americans as the “black genocide,” and to Obama as “the face of the minority survivor.” She was also attacked for her book “Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption Within the Democratic Party” (2006), which she wrote with Robert Stacy McCain, her college friend. Journalists noted that McCain was a former member of the League of the South—which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as “a white-supremacist organization that opposes racial intermarriage”—and had once commented online that the “media now force interracial images into the public mind, and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion.” McCain told me that when he was affiliated with the league, a decade ago, doing Civil War research, it had no racist agenda. And, he explained, he had posted the comment late at night, when he was worked up after watching “The Jerry Springer Show.”

When Rachel Maddow criticized Palin for having “chosen Lynn Vincent, who’s written a book with a white supremacist,” Vincent was aghast. “It’s all unreal and unfair,” she told me. “I wrote a book with an old college friend who, at some point, six years before we met up again, made some questionable racial remarks to somebody, and I’m supposed to be accountable for that?” At World, Vincent regularly wrote on controversial subjects, but the magazine’s circulation is only about a hundred thousand. “I wasn’t prepared for the viciousness of the attacks,” she said.

“Going Rogue” is a snappy read, moving briskly from the snowy wilderness to the fairgrounds of middle America and into the vipers’ nest of Washington insiders that was the McCain campaign. It was also, critics argued, a vehicle for score-settling and self-pity. “This is the memoir as prolonged, keening wail,” the Wall Street Journal said.

Yet Vincent has little tolerance for anything she perceives as whining. Sitting on her deck with Hollins, she said, “Women will never be equal enough, the environment will never be clean enough, because there are people invested in making a living off these grievances! Where does it stop?”

“Well, what about the N.R.A.?” Hollins asked her. “Short of handing guns out at sporting events, what else do they want?”

“That’s not fair to equate,” Vincent said, emphatically. “There’s not a gun movement.”

Hollins sighed. “O.K., so what minority has achieved equality? Are women equal? Have they broken the glass ceiling?”

“I’d have to do a study,” Vincent replied. “But I can say, as a woman who’s almost fifty, I’ve never experienced discrimination.”

One bright afternoon in San Diego, Danny and Lynn Vincent went to visit the chocolate Lab they were adopting, which they’d named Riggs, after Mel Gibson’s character in “Lethal Weapon.” “Saturday is my last day of work for two weeks,” Danny said. He was going on puppy paternity leave, which, his wife told me, was “not a request”: she had potty-trained enough males for one lifetime. On his ankle Danny has tattoos of Chinese characters signifying the names of their two sons; another, meaning “Lynn,” is over his Achilles tendon.

Danny Vincent has a goatee and was wearing sunglasses, flip-flops, an Adidas visor, and shorts. He grew up in Clairemont, a San Diego neighborhood near the beach. “Have you ever heard of Ridgemont High? That’s my school,” he said. “There were lots of Jeff Spicolis.”

“Tasty waves,” his wife said.

“Cool buds,” he replied.

The Vincents, who have been together for twenty-four years, recently renewed their vows, and Lynn showed me photographs of the ceremony on her iPhone. “We had had a difficult time—a struggle—in our marriage,” she said, “so we decided after we came through that to renew our vows and make it solid.”

Her pastor at the Rock, Miles McPherson, told me that the rift had been excruciating: “I can’t imagine my spouse doing what her spouse did. I don’t know how I would function. God would have to intervene.” McPherson was impressed by Vincent’s faith throughout her marital difficulties. “She is uncompromising in trusting God to lead her to do what’s right, no matter how hard it is, no matter what the consequences. Like with her husband, she said, I’m not going to compromise my beliefs on how a marriage should be just to get him back, just to make myself feel better.”

Danny Vincent, McPherson said, had been transformed by the experience and rediscovered his faith. “He’s seen a miracle, too. When you leave your wife, it may seem all fun and glamorous, but it’s miserable.” McPherson performed the couple’s second wedding ceremony in their new back yard.

Afterward, they went on a honeymoon to Catalina Island—which Lynn described as “like going to Cabo without the cartels and the dysentery”—but came back early in order to attend an Independence Day ceremony at a local supermarket. “The Fourth of July Food4Less event is very important in the life of the family!” Vincent said. Each July for four years, they have set up their R.V. in the parking lot to watch the fireworks.

Turning to her husband, she said, “You know you’re a redneck when . . .”

“You spend July 4th at the Food4Less,” he finished.

“When you finish your second honeymoon in a trailer at the Food4Less!” she added.

This kind of resolution—from spiritual torment to happy routine—is what Vincent wants for the characters in her books, for the homosexuals and adulterers in her life, and for all the sinners on God’s earth. (A few weeks after our meeting, Vincent e-mailed me to say, “I’ve been praying for you since you left here. You may be a nonbeliever, but that doesn’t mean you’re not God’s child.”) Her mother, Jan, died in 2005, of cirrhosis, without finding salvation. “I look back and say, ‘What a sad life,’ ” Vincent told me one Sunday afternoon after church. “She wound up living in this little house in this field somewhere outside Tuscaloosa, and after she died we went in to clear out her stuff,” she continued. “I found this file folder that had witchcraft lessons in it. She was literally taking mail-order lessons from the Enchantress Wanda in Wisconsin. There were worksheets that said, ‘Draw a rectangle on the floor and light a candle and say this spell.’ I just sat there and I cried. Why, Lord, could I not bring my faith to her and be more compassionate—why could I not love her into your kingdom?”

For the first time, Vincent is working on a book that does not have a “stand-up-and-cheer ending.” Since 2009, she has been interviewing thirty members of an Army unit in Afghanistan, who learned that a dozen local janitors, machine operators, and interpreters they depended upon were Taliban infiltrators—“and they themselves ended up on trial for war crimes, while the spies were set free!” Vincent said, disgusted. It is her most ambitious project—with enormous PEE potential—and it will be by Lynn Vincent, not with her. “It’s like the perfect marriage,” she said. “Not only do I get to indulge the action-suspense-military adventure—I get to go into the backstories of these ordinary, heroic men.” But it will be a difficult story for Vincent to tell; the raw materials offer little in the way of consolation or inspiration. “One of the guys has committed suicide,” Vincent said. “I am hoping God writes a more redemptive ending.” ♦